Our client was a first-time entrepreneur who wants to make it easier for working parents to educate their children (aged 5 – 12) while at home. She offers 1:1 online lessons and activities, and asked us to design an app for her product.

Overall, her product has 3 main aspects:

• A parent-facing mobile app to book classes and follow children's progress

• A child-facing tablet & laptop app to attend classes

• A teacher-facing multi-platform app to provide & host classes

Given our time-frame, we had to limit ourselves to one of those aspects only. In agreement with the client, we decided to prioritize the parent-facing app, as the classes could temporarily be operated through another video platform.

The constraints we faced.

Additionally, we had to consider the following constraints:

1. As already mentioned, we had a very limited time frame

2. Our client had a lot of different ideas, sometimes incompatible with each others

3. The product was still new, not fully shaped, and there was no defined MVP

4. Due to COVID, there were many competitors joining this segment and we needed to differentiate our client's product from her competition

All this meant we had to prioritize features and come up with a strategy for the product on top of designing the MVP.

Let’s look at the market.

From micro-learning to gamification and infotainment, with new learning platforms such as video games, virtual and augmented reality, social media … the market was already fierce with innovation. Yet, “thanks” to the pandemic pushing families into lockdown, we felt there was a huge opportunity gap that our client's product could fill.

For our competition, we observed many online education and entertainment platforms:

As we analysed our competition, we placed it on a matrix to identify if there was any gap in the market. The yellow area for medium market presence and high user satisfaction seems a perfect place to position ourselves!

What do users need?

Now that we knew where the market was, and where it could grow, we went to talk to people. We interviewed 5 working parents, as well as 3 elementary school teachers for further informations. Here’s what they told us:

First, we learned working parents struggle with their kids’ education, and the pandemic only accentuated it. They want to trust online learning, but they need our help in making it better. Privacy and security often came up as a concern. Also, they looked closely at lessons’ content and whether it fits their kids’ education level.

Furthermore, parents want their kids to be engaged in fun and interactive extracurricular activities in addition to academics. Learning should be fun, and adapted to kids.

“The teacher should [do] a lot of fun activity, like a little bit of jokes, a little bit of some colouring, or some other activity other than just the lesson.”

Both parents and teachers said that, if done well, online activities can provide kids with a great sense of independence. But it had to be done well. Also, they think online education is easier with younger teachers.

“Kids like to see young faces, so that they are not intimidated. Rather than a stone face where they are scared, […] it's just psychology.”

How can we help?

Once we knew our users’ motivations and concerns, we could sum it all up in personas.

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Because of our time constraint, we decided to focus on our primary persona, Sharon, but we kept Adrián in mind as we continued the design process. We looked at what would be Sharon’s experience as she tries to find courses for her daughter.

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Finally, as we looked at the opportunities in Sharon’s journey, we could define our problem:

The busy professional needs a way to provide genuine educational support to their kids in order to focus on growing their career while their kids are engaged in fun educational activities with someone they trust.

Let’s make it happen!

Now that we knew our problem, let’s look at our solution. We began with a brainstorming session to define general characteristics of the app, and created 3 concepts these them.

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We presented these concepts to a few testers and to our client, then, based on their feedback, we prepared a sitemap and some user flows to further refine our design.

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With all those, we built mid-fidelity wireframes, and iterated until we felt we could show them to users. Here’s our last version:

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Meet the App.

Let’s put it to the test.

We ran informal formative testing as we iterated our design, but with this mid-fidelity prototype, it was time for a proper usability test. We presented it to 4 potential users who fit our primary persona, and gave them 5 tasks which explored different aspects of our app. They all completed all tasks. Here’s what they said:

What’s next?

This project is over for us, but we provided our recommendations to our client, based on our research and our users’ feedback.

What I learned.

If this project taught me one thing, it’s to rely on the design thinking process. Particularly, our client had a difficulty and couldn’t come to a meeting, but we still were able to move forward rather than being stuck.

Finally, working with this client taught me how important communication is. As a first-time entrepreneur, she didn’t really knew what she could expect from us, and it was important to guide her on her journey.

© 2020 – Alexandre Ultré